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The Band: A Press Release

Some nights shine so strangely you can’t parse them/ Sometimes that strangeness is the whole point.

Moonface (Spencer Krug), refracted

New Note: At this point my first book of music, personal, and world history is underway. This book will feature new witting, pieces from my blog edited and expanded or compressed, as well as yet unpublished pieces that I have in my archive. Therefore on the event of tomorrow’s full moon, I will re-print “The Band: A Press Release.”

“The Band: A Press Release” is a second piece of “automatic writing,” writing that comes so fast it’s like it’s downloaded or something. I wrote it in 2018 while standing on a train platform waiting to change trains here in Kyoto. I had met some acquaintances the night before at a bar, and, as detailed in the piece, drew inspiration from their somewhat absurd banter. So I wrote this, in about 8-10 minutes, as if I was the press agent for the group. It was just a little conceit to get the piece going, but it also subtly makes fun of press releases and corporate communication in general. 

I really like this piece, despite the fact that it is undeniably odd. Some of the lines still make me laugh, such as “There is a Plan C. Plan C will be referred to as ‘Plan C’. Plan C is cancelation;” and “An extra? A fifth member? Is that a leak? Does the band leak? Does it, after all, hold water?” As I like to say, it’s funny to me.

But this piece is really based on Jungian interpretation of Christianity. So basically as I understand it Christianity has the trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, which are traditionally recognized. However Jung argued, in essence, that there is a “fourth term,” which is a kind of background term, of the overall dynamic field that helps inform the other three archetypes. I guess I was just trying to outdo Jung; I’m a little competitive that way with my heroes. In any case, here is the piece. The quote toward the end if from David Berman of The Silver Jews.

Note: A few years ago I was working on some major events, and thinking a lot about “event theory.” I’m not even sure event theory is a thing, but it was for me. Anyway, I was at an interesting old bar in North Kyoto called “Brown’s,” (since closed) when I ran into a guy I knew a bit called Jamie. Jamie and I are not, I would say, friends, and in fact I don’t know if I like Jamie all that much. However, I had once been to his apartment where he had a full in-home movie theatre set up and he showed us the film Rockers: It’s Dangerous, which is a bizarre film about some reggae dudes in Kingston Jamaica. The film is kind of hit or miss, however the soundtrack is amazing.

When I met Jamie at Brown’s he was with another friend of his. We were talking some event theory and Jamie started telling me about a “band” he and his buddy were putting together. (I should add here that it was during this evening that Jamie uttered the immortal phrase “an event should be eventful,” which I have appropriated and made my own ever since. So I guess I kind of like Jamie after all). Jamie and his buddy’s band was a fake one, he said, and although they played no music they were planning to travel to Boracay to discuss their plans. Haha, I said, could I join? No said Jamie, they were only recruiting women. That was it—Jamie’s concept was not very well fleshed out, but he gave me a seed of something. The next day I wrote this piece, called “The Band.” It’s tone is not like anything else I’ve ever written. I can’t exactly stand by this piece, but nor can I renounce it, so here it is.

To Whom It May Concern:

Good evening. I am here to introduce to you a new band. You will always remember this evening, as you are the first audience to hear about the band, which will go on to shake the music industry to the core. However, I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, but you will not be hearing from the band this evening. They are very busy preparing for the possibility of contemplating their first show, which you will hear about in a few minutes.

At that time, you will be given a inside tip about how to score FREE TICKETS for this gig, but first I should explain the membership arrangement of the band, as it is a bit special. The band is a trio consisting of two humans and a third member, a “third term”, which is referred to as “the floating concept.” The floating concept triangulates the members and makes the band structure as we know it possible. The band structure is therefore equivalent to a trinity. Without the floating concept, the band would spill apart in a matter of hours due to its own frivolity and according to the second law of thermodynamics.

Who are these band members, you will want to know? Of course you do. When something this special, this fresh, this frankly white hot, comes along it draws all eyes. Well, I can let you in on this much–the members are multi-talented young artistes on the cutting edge of fashion who are even as we speak enacting the first true artistic theory of the 21st century. They are considering and arranging all aspects of their performance, except those aspects that relate to the music to be played. There is a reason for this–the band can play no music, owns no instruments, and is in no hurry to learn their craft. They are instead, busy, very busy, honing their CONCEPT, Just as night follows day, and form follows function, the band believes, as its only tenant of belief, that craft follows concept.

Now, with the three members in place, is there room for more, you may ask. Yes indeed. In fact the band is actively recruiting a fourth member, and the position is wide open. There are some conditions on this member, however. First, the fourth member must be a woman, a female. Second, she must be gorgeous and bewitching. (For the time being, in advance of her arrival, we shall refer to her as the “background term.” Upon her arrival, the band will, momentarily, become a quaternary.) Third, and crucially, she must break up the band almost instantaneously upon joining it. There are no other conditions.

Now, you will be eager to know when and where the band will be playing as the break up of the band could occur at any time, in the blink of an eye, and is entirely at the mercy of the bewitching female, the eternal anima. Fortunately, plans for the band’s first gig are already well underway. The band will be convening in March of 2014 in Boracay, just 11 months from today, to discuss its next move. At this point we are thrilled to be able to announce that in Boracay the agenda point of a concert or live event of some kind IS a distinct possibility. In short, a performance concept MAY be discussed. What that performance might look like is currently a matter of the highest secrecy not to mention massive uncertainty. After all, as I am sure you will agree, the first true artistic theory of the 21st century, the theoretical descendant of surrealism, pop art, and the theater of the absurd, needs some little time to germinate. It cannot be rushed.

However, there is some information that we are prepared to release tonight. First, initial scouting has been undertaken on the island of Gibraltar, and very tentative discussions are being undertaken with representatives of the Zimbabwean government regarding possible locations. At present, we are referring to these as “Plan A,” and “Plan B.” In the event that either Plan A or Plan B materializes, you will be able to score FREE admission by simply attaching yourself to the flash mob which will storm the venue precisely 20 minutes after the band takes “the stage.” In order to join the flash mob, you will simply need to locate third member of the band, the floating concept, who will be leading the mob. Please be aware that the floating concept IS floating, and therefore by definition is subject to frequent re-definition and re-nominalization. In other words, by the time the third term reaches this putative future time/space conjunction it may well be styling itself as something entirely other. There is a Plan C. Plan C will be referred to as “Plan C.” Plan C is cancelation. In the event of cancelation, the concert/event will be simulcast across all platforms for viewing in the comfort of your own home.

I know that at this point you will be salivating to know more, that you will already be scouring the internet for more information about the band and its concept. What we can say is, anything you might read online is the purest of speculation. The band does not leak, in fact it does not even hold water. From an atmospheric point of view, however, the band is currently working under the following umbrella, and I quote:

Guinnevere orders one more beer in the smokey pick-up bar/ A burnt out tramp by the exit ramp waits for one more car/ The Latin teacher always smells like piss/ The census figures come out wrong/ there’s an extra in our midst.”

An extra? A fifth member? Is that a leak? Does the band leak? Does it, after all, hold water? Come and see, follow us across all social media platforms, tell your family, tell your friends, tell your neighbors, don’t tell a soul. The telos of the art world is about to be revolutionized, about to jump the shark, run rampant, build its own contingent, its own motherfucking army. Follow the band, tap into the excitement come and see a legend while it’s still being made! Ladies, gentlemen, I give you, THE BAND.

Dedication: For Jamie, I guess.

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On Staying in Business Hotels (Featuring a Little 9-ball)

A hotel room: the same cell in a different city — clean towels, a window, and the sense of being contained but cared for

Mark Sandman, refracted

A haunted hotel room, unblessed, charged with static; objects shifting on their own.

The Church, refracted

New Note: On the kibbitzer (two b’s there Mr. Auto-Correct baby), I am re-printing certain select pieces for a little while while I work on another writing project. Today I am re-printing this piece on hotels. This piece has gone through several iterations over time, it is in fact probably my most heavily edited piece, and concerns the experience of staying at business hotels. In a way this is perhaps my very best piece in that it is one of only three that survive from my first blog Classical Sympathies, which I started in 2008, right around the time I began working to build the IB Course at our school. Of course given later (and earlier) events, this was no coincidence. Essentially, the blogs were, for lack of a better phrase “trauma blogs,” or, to put it more positively, recovery blogs. I like that–let’s stick with it. So this piece was about finding safety, physical and psychological, in a hotel room, while at the same time knowing, paradoxically, that hotels, especially fancy ones, are sometimes, or even often, the target of violence for various reasons.

Note: I have stayed in a number of such hotels over the years and engaged deeply with the room-space in each case. At this point, I am prepared to say that I am “good at” staying in hotels (an absurd claim that I advance nonetheless), and feel authorized to advance some notes toward a general hotel theory. Facility as a hotel guest though not exactly a marketable skill, has yielded some insights about the general, perhaps archetypal, nature of the modern hotel stay. Despite at this point considerable experience in the field, I continue to find the hotel experience at once comforting and bizarre, and hotel rooms, when properly apportioned, womb-like and exercising a specific and fascinating gravity. Also, the first draft of this piece was completed when Larry King was still alive.

This piece also mentions my “fugue state,” and it is true that as a PTSD response to childhood sexual abuse I would sometimes, more than once for sure, slip into a kind of state of taking automatic actions which I recall, but only somewhat. During these states I would arrange and re-arrange the room, the things in my bag, etc. in a way to place little reminders to myself in the future. It is a little hard to explain, however once again psychologically literate folks will follow along.

Finally, in my opinion, this is a pretty funny piece. Not as funny as Mason Anderson but still not bad. And it advances the absurd, yet still somehow defensible, position that I am “good at” staying in hotels. I hope you enjoy it.

Part I:

The TV was turned to CNN, which was focused on violence somewhere. I could not tell where. The experts in their suits and hairsprayed hair presented the conflict as if conflict was inevitable. They agreed it was happening now and could be prevented, but at the same time at the conclusion of the piece they smiled politely and signed off as if the violence was also occurring in a land so distant it might as well be the past.

Emily Maloney

I have stayed in quite a number of business hotels, in quite a number of countries. This piece provides, in essence, a sort of “psychograph” of the business hotel experience. Three features of business hotels that we may want to consider are: i) like airports, all business hotels share a single ethos, an un-pindownable character that feels, wherever one happens to be geographically speaking, of a piece; ii) the effect of the television offerings, in particular CNN International, on the business traveler, is one of overwhelming relaxation, bordering on complacency and even numbness; iii) as a corollary to i), it is far easier to enumerate how business hotels resemble one another than to lay out any salient differences.

Oddly, minor local variations only seem to further reinforce a central sameness. Checking into an 11th floor room at a classic example of the species, for instance the Numzau Tokyu Hotel, half an hour south of Tokyo, Japan, one is affected at once by that strangely pleasant fugue state, a state of mind almost exactly halfway between bliss and malaise, attendant on “business” hotels. Once inside a business hotel, especially those neither top-of-the-line nor quite down-and-out, one is confronted with a kind of disembodied space which seems at once connected to a global network of similar hotels (accomplished in part through the simultaneously soothing and hypnotizing effect of CNN International) and disconnected from the local environment. The traveler is sucked into global weirdness through a combination of the flat, post-political window of CNN, the persistent low hum of the air conditioner, and the anodyne staleness, almost spartan, quality of the decor.

Oddly, any “artwork” or decorative flourishes that a hotel room may possess only serves to further a sense of featurelessness; the art in question being almost exclusively of the most banal nature–bland seascapes, abstracts denuded of all edge or verve, and those odd non-paintings that, try as you might, you forget the second you exit your room. One has to remind oneself that a business trip means that there is work to be done–the TV, the slight high resulting from contact with the bowing attendants, the men in black, and the blushing young lady who carries your bag, the knowledge that your company is footing the bill–all this lulls you into a kind of sleep of the spirit.

Turning on the TV, you feel that you could spend years, lifetimes even, staring at CNN’s Larry King (the long-dessicated one), the post-racial female anchors who bring that special Code 46 feel of the non-overt future, or the exquisitely paralyzing “World Weather,” before awakening in another age, the Rip Van Winkle of the travel world. When CNN finally wears out its welcome, one’s choices of pay channels open up the fascinating worlds of…golf (the Golf Channel), silicone starlets (the Playboy Channel), intimate acts in close-up (the “adult channel”), and, most fittingly, drama set in outer space (the Battlstar Galatica channel). This profile of options, golf, softcore, hardcore, and outer space, the result, presumably, of reams of data on the tastes of business travelers like me, the mobile working male, I want to find depressing, but the menu has something beautifully efficient about it. Not wanting to get sucked into the anesthesizing vortex of any of these choices, I have to force myself to rise from the supine contemplation of the only-vaguely Chinese news anchor and move on with the day.

My senses are momentarily quickened by a report of an attack on a hotel in Pakistan: a horrific assault which has taken place at a Marriott in Islamabad. Oddly, the reality of this event quickly fades, and what Richard Todd calls the “non-ness” of the Marriott up the road strangely becomes the non-ness of violence–the attack in Islamabad conveys, through the lens of the CNN International, not exactly shock, but a continuing and deepening sense of global weirdness only slightly tinged by fear resting on the realization that as a business traveler in exactly this kind of hotel, I am the target. Oddly, this realization is not as disturbing as it ought to be: my fugue state is such that I am more in, more of, Islamabad than Numazu, but not wholly there either. Instead, I am poised somewhere between Islamabad and Battlestar Galactica, cavorting with post-racial android news anchors who bring me news of a planet this 11th floor, air-conditioned bubble of a non-space has left far behind.

Part II:

In part II of this essay will we delve a little deeper into the business hotel experience using as a lens “J.G. Ballard: Conversations.” Ballard probably needs no introduction, but for those who have yet to fall until his influence, he is the author of “Empire of the Sun” and “Crash” who wrote dozens of fantastic semi-Sci Fi short stories in the late 1950s and through the 1960s including “Prima Belladonna,” Thirteen to Centaurus,” and “The Terminal Beach.” Ballard novels, in my opinion, are not as uniformly satisfying as his short stories; at novel length his “obsessions,” beach resorts, empty swimming pools, gated communities, plastic surgery, car crashes, the interplay of sexuality and technology, tend to wear a little thin.

In “Conversations,” Ballard offers the following defense of his insularity and thematic repetition: “I think the values of bourgeois society by and large have triumphed. We’re living in a world where people at the age of 22 and 23 are thinking about their mortgages. It is a fact, and there’s nothing much on can do about it, except cultivate one’s obsessions and one’s own imagination” (144), but this approach works better in his short stories (which Ballard has not written for nearly two decades now), where his limited set of concerns are reflected and replayed through a panoply of settings and situations such that he resembles a virtuoso musician building off of certain stable base elements to create endless riffs and improvisations.

As a boy, Ballard was, famously, incarcerated in a Japanese prison camp in Shanghai, and this formative experience informs both his autobiographical “Empire of the Sun” and his short stories. But instead of literal prisons with externally imposed walls and limitations, Ballard’s characters seem over and over again to be immured within prisons of their own creation. Story after story features some variation on one of two related themes; scientists careening off on private quests that eventually destroy them or people seemingly sequestered or restrained who turn out to be acting in psychic complicity with their imprisonment. Ballard himself admits to the centrality of the prison experience in “Conversations” when Mark Pauline asks him “Writing Empire of the Sun hasn’t helped you forget those horrible years in the camp” and Ballard responds “But I’ve been writing about it all the time–I just wrote about it in disguise” (138).

“J.G. Ballard: Conversations” was overseen by one V. Vale, who, to all appearances, is a full-fledged Ballard maniac, and contains a number of Vale’s telephone conversations with Ballard and other Ballardians including the composer Graeme Revell and Ballard archivist, David Pringle. Ballard has a lot to say about that particular semi-reality fugue state described in my earlier post. As noted above, Ballard has a special fascination with self-imposed psychic incarceration: “I have a nightmare vision of a gated community of extremely expensive houses inside a larger gated community. It’s bizarre” (72). Ballard is also concerned with the dual themes of self-immurement and the mind-meld that occurs between the individual and their media systems. These two themes may not seem to be obviously related, but after reading 300 pages of Ballard on the telephone, all of his particular obsessions do seem intertwined, and connect with my experience of staying in business hotels. Take for example Ballard on why Surrealism no longer obtains:

“Classical surrealism, beginning after the First World War, made a very clear distinction between the outer world of reality {…} and the inner world of imagination {…} But after the Second World War, particularly as the media landscape developed enormously–thanks to television, mass advertising and the whole consumer goods landscape–the distinction between our reality and inner fantasy began to break down {…} This means that it’s very difficult to maintain the dichotomy, that contrast that the Surrealists required {…} As I’ve said before, in the last 20 years if you stop somebody in the street and ask the time, you might look at a watch with Mickey Mouse on the dial {…} It cuts the ground from under classical Surrealism” (166).

When viewing CNN International at a business hotel, I realize, pace Ballard, that the world as reflected does have aspects of the surreal, especially in the consummately inoffensive manner in which it presents horrific international incidents interlaced with “the exquisitely paralyzing World Weather” and 9-ball tournaments from Bangkok replayed several times a day. This approach effectively colonizes my own imagination by rendering the unthreatening creepy and and the unbearable passe.

The oddest thing about CNN International is that the news itself is actually not all that bad. Real news about real, important, global events, comes across the airwaves, but it gets somehow stripped on much of its impact through the presentation. Ballard in 1991: “We get the Newzak all the time. It’s been homogenized, trivialized, and there’s too much filler added to smooth it down so that it comes out like paste from a tube” (178). It’s not that the news isn’t there, it’s just that, pace Ballard, there is no room for either surrealism or real impact. Ballard explains that the Dali/ Bunuel films (Un chien andalou and L’ Âge d’or), so shocking at the time, would not work today: “The sight of people dragging dead donkeys through a dining room would {seem to be} some sort of advertising stunt–a beer commercial” (166). Here is David Pringle on why Ballard is not a Marxist:

“Ballard, being a good Freudian, is much more interested in the individual’s–yours and mine–collusion with what’s going on, our secret wishes, that in the idea of conspiracy–that there are conspiratorial entities out there trying to ‘get us’ {…} Ballard asks, ‘What are you out to do to yourself? What are you own darkest wishes? What are we all doing to ourselves collectively?'” (226).

Ballard also writes “I accept the Surrealist formula: the need to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible, to remake the world around us by the power of one’s imagination, which after all is all we’ve got. I mean, the central nervous system is faced with a world of Mariott hotels and ex-actors turned world leaders, dangerous medicines and you name it. The individual central nervous system can only attempt to make sense of this” (276).

Eventually, if she has even the slightest modicum of self-awareness, the business traveler comes face to face with Ballard’s question: “‘What are you out to do to yourself? What are you own darkest wishes? What are we all doing to ourselves collectively?’ This is because the enervating lassitudinal comfort of your standard Mariott is, in the worst possible sense, addictive. When you begin to run down the list of hotel features: airport pickup, bowing attendants, elevators, room service, air conditioning, permanently locked windows, security barrier, ubiquitous carpeting, fresh towels and soap, overpriced but almost appetizing meals, pool and hot tub, 9-ball on a loop, world weather, all these items add up to a simulacrum of a total existence that very quickly begins to edge out the rest of the world–there is no need to leave the compound and submission to the soft tyranny of over-priced conveniences sets in almost immediately.

At the same time, CNN International allows the illusion of connectedness while in fact only furthering one’s suspension in the high-rise ether of the business hotel complex. “One has the illusion you’ve seen a place in fact when you haven’t seen it at all. All you’ve seen are the airports and the hotels” (288). Ballard here hints at something I have long felt to be the case: all airports actually belong to a single country, and the vast majority of business hotels likewise sit uneasily within their supposed national confines; they are more like each other than they are like the buildings or community around them. The overpriced airport hotel in Tokyo resembles nothing so much as the overpriced airport hotel in Vancouver, which in turn is the kissing cousin of the airport hotel in Beijing, etc. Here again, local differences only seem to accentuate a basic central identicalness.

Ballard again: “People use mental formulas that they’ve learned from TV. Even in ordinary conversation, if you’re talking to the mechanic at the garage about whether you need new tires for your car, you and he probably talk in a way that his equivalent thirty years ago would never have done. You use–not catch phrases but verbal formulas. Suddenly you realize you’re hearing echoes of some public-information, accident-prevention commercial. It’s uncanny” (83).

(Ballard has the strange habit of ending thought after thought with “It’s bizarre;” “It’s strange;” “It’s uncanny”–this verbal tick serves as a running indicator of the way that Ballard sees the world and helps explain how, over the course of a novel, he can focus on a certain object, a tennis machine for example, or swimming pool, with such relentless obsessed focus that the formerly normal becomes invested with a kind of pathological creepiness that entirely transcends simplistic one-to-one correlative symbolism.)

Ballard’s central point here hints again at the colonizing power of certain ideas and turns of phrases which seep into our everyday speech, tempered only by feeble attempts to ironize. Thus, when in the course of normal conversation one refers to a storm as “an extreme climatological event,” to a sign as “singage,” or to a car crash as “a simultaenous intersection of vehicular components” the use of such terms, although masked with a patina of apparently self-knowing irony is still, in its own way, perfectly sincere. Here, submission to the linguistic idiocy of corporate non-speak marries submission to the blissful “non-ness” of the business hotel, a paradise of our own collective fantasy where the towels are always clean, the windows are always closed, and 9-ball is always on.

Dedication: For the APA chain. I know it’s kind of a cult, but man are they reasonable, conveniently located, and comfy.

Works Cited:

J.G. Ballard, J.G. Ballard: Conversations, ed. V. Vale (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 2005).

Emily Maloney, from an essay in an early-2000s political anthology (exact source lost to time)

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On “Shortcuts” and “Backways”

Some folks swear by one fighter, others by a different guitarist or a different singer; tastes split and recombine in funny ways. I’ve always had room for all of them.

Mark Kozelek, refracted

New Note: For the time being, the Kibbitzer will be in reprint mode. There are a few reasons for this, the primary being I am working on a new writing project which is a little longer term and will take up most of my time for the foreseeable future. So, I will try to reprint only those pieces that seem of the moment we are in any given day or week. The first of these is this short, but for me very meaningful, piece on shortcuts and back ways. Sometimes the shortest pieces say the most, you know.

This piece is basically about ways to get somewhere, specifically some of the potential traps of shortcuts, and the charms of back ways. I believe the piece pretty much speaks for itself however I will say I have made some medium big life moves recently, and when you do do that it is important to stay alert and minimize mistakes. Shortcuts get you there quicker, but they can be a little dicey. I think, generally speaking, shortcuts are not so scary, the fear, such as it is, is mostly in your head. As for back ways, at all the houses I can remember my parents living at there is the “normal way” and the “backway.” I suspect my parents of being a little sneaky in this respect; I believe they intentionally chose places based to live on this basis. But that’s just my theory.

The epigraph for this piece features the two guitarists for Judas Priest, Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing. Kozelek is a big music fan, like most musicians, and appreciates both men unlike some. I am not a huge Priest fan, however my friends in high school were, and we would drive around with the Priest blaring. I like “Turning Circles” from 1981’s Point of Entry (track 4 of 11 by the way, batting cleanup), and I have no opinion on the guitarist issue. Both are fine with me.

There are a lot of items in the world. Two of those items are “shortcuts” and “backways.”

Shortcuts and backways are far from identical, however I posit that they belong in the same general category. What is this category? Well, they are both alternative paths to an intended destination. In other words, they are minor (perhaps) but still important navigational options. And, both have unique, and in my opinion potentially attractive, features.

I like both shortcuts and backways. However other folks may well like one and not the other. This is because in a certain sense shortcuts and backways are opposites, or at least on different ends of a continuum. Shortcuts take less time, clearly, and backways usually take more time. The midpoint of this continuum I guess would be “the normal way,” or just “the way.” A lot of folks will just take the normal way because it’s normal. Or, they may not even be aware of a shortcut or a backway. Sometimes we have to scout around a bit to find these items.

What might a shortcut look like in practice? Could be jumping a fence, maybe an alleyway, a tunnel, perhaps cutting through someone’s backyard. Could be a path through the trees on a ski slope, or a secret set of stairs in a mansion (the servants’ stairs perhaps). I would suggest, just float, the hypothesis that shortcuts always, or at least almost always, have a degree of real or perceived danger or risk to them. Alleyways are known to harbor RATS. Paths through the trees may have BUMPS and EXPOSED ROOTS. Sneaking through a backyard, we may encounter AN IRATE PROPERTY OWNER with a BIG FAT GUN. Even the servants’ stairs may have GHOSTS, DARK SECRETS, or even ECTOPLASM floating about. When you take a shortcut it’s best to be a bit on your guard.

What about backways? What do these look like? Here we are in slightly more complex waters. A short cut, as mentioned above, when executed properly, takes less time. That’s kind of the point. But while backways often take more time, they need not. In other words, it’s not definitional. Indeed, if there is a normal way and a backway to your home from your work, for example, you may time the two routes and find they are in fact fairly similar. However, the backway is likely to feel longer. This is because the backway, and I believe this to be more definitional, is more scenic. And scenery (scenicness?), being absorbing, can sort of mentally slow us down. Is that right? I’m not sure, but it’s in the neighborhood of right.

After all, what is a backway really “back” of? I mean, a backway doesn’t like automatically lead to a “back door” or anything. Also, we don’t call the normal way the “frontway,” now do we? It’s just the way. Therefore, the backway is back of the way. In other words, again, it’s kind of minor, less populated, or in some other way odd. That’s why it’s the backway.

Now, an interesting difference between a shortcut and a backway is that a shortcut is not only applicable when navigating physical space, but is also applicable when navigating all other kinds of spaces. You can find shortcuts in decision making, in writing, in computer coding, in all types of places. According to Mr. Google a shortcut is:

1. an alternative route that is shorter than the one usually taken.

2. an accelerated way of doing or achieving something.

You see what I mean. On the other hand a backway is mostly applicable to physical space. Mr. Google in fact simply defines backway as “a back alley.” But Mr. Google is way off here. As outlined above, I don’t even think a back alley is a backway per se. I think it’s a subset of shortcut. Mr. Google needs to re-examine the situation. Mr. Google needs to read this blog. Nonetheless, we don’t generally refer to “a backway to a decision,” we might instead say we took a longer time (time not space), or used an unconventional method to reach a conclusion (process not space). Therefore, “shortcut” as a term is much more capacious than “backway.”

That’s about it on shortcuts and backways. Like Mr. Kozelek, I like ‘em all.

Dedication: For Julian Jaynes.

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On Some Bands That Don’t Like Each Other I: The Breakup of Galaxie 500

Note: This new series will take up a seriously interesting topic, band break-ups. We will also look at some bands that don’t like each other but somehow stay together, such as The Rolling Stones. Some bands I hope to write about include Jane’s Addiction, The Smiths, and Pink Floyd–these are all situations I know something about and am interested in. Other bands that had a bad break up, or at least serious tension, include of course The Beatles, The Clash, and Guns ‘N Roses. I’m not sure if I’ll write about The Beatles because that has all been heavily covered, but the other two maybe, when I can look into them. But we will start with the breakup of the late 80’s and early 90’s band, Galaxie 500. This piece draws on a collection of snippets about the situation on the website A Head Full of Wishes, which is run by Galaxie and Luna’s biggest fan, who I believe lives in the U.K. Dean knows him well I believe. I think a lot of people are interested in this general topic, so I hope this series reaches some of you.

Galaxie 500 broke up in 1991, when the lead singer and songwriter Dean Wareham quit the band on the phone after a final show at Bowdoin College on the 5th of April of that year. The band had been on an extensive tour, and played some dates as the opener for The Cocteau Twins, which would have been a pretty big deal for what was still an up-and-coming band. Galaxie 500 was set to begin a tour in Japan shortly after this, and Dean quit when his bandmate Damon Krukowski called him to book plane tickets. AI gets the part about Dean quitting, suddenly, at least from Damon’s perspective, but also says that a contributing factor was that Damon and his partner Naomi Yang were becoming “disillusioned” with the band’s situation. However I don’t think this is really right, because Damon and Naomi are on the record saying how devastated they were by the breakup and that they did not see Dean quitting coming at all. It is clear that Dean and Damon were not getting along for a while prior, but Damon definitely wanted to continue the band. Dean would go on to form Luna almost immediately, one of the great bands of all time, and Damon and Naomi would record several records under their own names, some of which are good, however it would take them some years to recover from the ending of Galaxie.

I have actually written about this breakup a bit twice before, in the context of other pieces. I first wrote about it in my piece about seeing Damon and Naomi live in Kyoto in the earlier part of this century. This was the famous night that Damon told me to shut up, and the whole story is pretty funny. I also alluded to the breakup in a different piece about stage banter when I was discussing the Luna record Luna Live. The two extracts below actually tell a good bit of the story.

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From my piece on Damon:

Damon and Naomi were members of the late 80s/ early 90’s band Galaxie 500 with Dean Wareham. The band didn’t really know what it was doing at first, like many a band before, and kind of stumbled into near-greatness before Wareham walked and started Luna, the world’s greatest band. Wareham details the reasons behind the break-up in his memoir Black Postcards. Poe is supposed to have said that any man who tells the simple truth of his life would write a masterpiece. Wareham gets pretty close to following Poe’s dictum.

The ending of Galaxie 500 came about, according to Wareham, essentially because Wareham was tired of being treated like a child by the other two, a long-time couple. I think he wanted his own band, and wanted to chill a little.  From Black Postcards:

Traveling is stressful. And with Damon tour-managing, it seemed like every hotel check-in, every seat assignment, and every rental car was a problem. Damon would argue about what floor his room was on. He would get annoyed if he didn’t get the seat he wanted on the flight. I shouldn’t have let this bother me. I should have minded my own business. But traveling together highlights your differences.

At one show in late 1990, a techie shone a spotlight on Dean as he stepped downstage for a solo. This seems to have been the breaking point. Black Postcards again:

Damon: “In retrospect I notice that Dean chose the L.A. show to launch this new trick, when the audience was full of music industry people. We hadn’t had any spotlights in Columbus or Dallas!”

Dean in his contemporaneous tour diary: “Damon said he doesn’t like me walking in front of his drum kit–it throws him off. I didn’t tell him to go fuck himself.”

Things were rough, and Dean split in 1991. (Wareham quotes a Damon interview saying “Here are the dirty facts!  What happened was simply that Dean quit, more or less out of the blue, on the telephone one day.”  Ah oui, les sales faits.) Galaxie 500 is still an interesting band and has a handful of great songs. Then, Damon and Naomi formed their own group, named eponymously. They are pretty good. I like “This Car Climbed Mount Washington,” from More Sad Hits, and the whole record Playback Singers is strong.  Still, they are a far cry from Galaxie, much less Luna.

From my piece on Dean’s stage banter:

Luna Live is a showcase record from 2005 from one of the greatest bands ever, Luna. It basically serves as a greatest hits pre-Rendevous (their final album and my personal favorite), and features killer renditions of a number of classics, including “Chinatown,” (their poppiest tune); “Friendly Advice,” (guitar on the original by Sterling Morrison); “23 Minutes in Brussels” (Luna’s “Marquee Moon,” and somehow their most popular song); and, epically, “4th of July,” originally a Galaxie 500 song.

4th of July, from Galaxie 500’s last album This is Our Music, is relevant here as it firmly established Wareham as a comedian. The inter-band dynamic of Galaxie 500 is interesting, suffice it to say here that the sonic and lyrical nature of the band did not obviously lend itself to comedy, although comedy was there in Wareham, the beating heart of the band, all along. In his awesome memoir Black Postcards, Wareham calls This is Our Music the band’s weakest record, and Wareham at the time was in the process of leaving the band. Wareham has his own reasons for his opinion about the final Galaxie record, however 4th of July is the seminal Galaxie song, with “Don’t Let Our Youth go to Waste,” as its only real competition. 

The song opens with one of Wareham’s deadpan mini-monologues — a tossed-off poem rejected by a dog, a drunken glance at the Empire State Building, everything reduced to the size of a nickel — all of it funny and self-deflating in the signature Galaxie way.

Later, the narrator holes up on July 4th, staging what he calls a “bed-in” for one, a perfect slacker-era joke that half-mocks and half-honors Yoko-and-Lennon theatrics. Given that his band mate Naomi Yang was heavily influenced by Yoko Ono, that Dean was trying to get out of Galexie and change his style but having a hard time getting up the nerve to make the break, that the song comes from 1991, the beginning of the “slacker” era, and that Wareham himself describes himself as “lazy” on numerous occasions in his memoir, there is no finer kiss-off to the idea of a visibly politically engaged artist than this line. (Of course Wareham was also a big Lennon fan, and his cover of Jealous Guy on The Best of Luna is sweet and cool.)  4th of July also blows Oasis’ “start a revolution from my bed” from the water. Oasis doesn’t come within a million miles of Dean Wareham.

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According to A Head Full of Wishes, there were about forty of fifty people at the Bowdoin show, which was kind of normal for shows at a small college back in the day. I have written elsewhere about shows at small colleges in one of my pieces about my time at Hamilton College. In Black Postcards, Dean states that the opening band at the Bowdoin show played too long and the band was irritated about it. After the show Dean left in his car (an attendee of the show said “he packed up and went out the door and drove away. I don’t even think he said thank you”) and apart from the Japan phone call I don’t know if Dean and Damon have ever spoken again. In 1997, Damon stated that they had not, but that’s a long time ago and Galaxie 500 still collects royalties so there must be some communication, at least between business managers. I find the whole royalties situation in general very interesting, and would like to know more about how it all works.

As seen above, in Black Postcards, Dean details some of his running frustrations with Damon and it is clear from this book that he had been getting up the nerve to leave for a while, and had discussed this with Damon and Naomi more than once. “Damon called first. My heart skipped a beat. The moment was upon me. I said don’t buy the tickets to Japan because I was leaving the band, and this time it was for real. They weren’t so nice and understanding this time. They were furious. There were three days of angry phone calls.”

Naomi basically confirms this, saying that, in an out of character moment, she yelled at Dean on the phone. “I couldn’t believe that Dean could just throw everything away so carelessly and not even want to discuss it.”

Now Galaxie 500 were a very good band, but I also suspect that what was happening was that Dean, over and above his frustrations with Damon’s tour managing and the rest, just wanted his own thing. Luna’s first album is Lunapark from 1992, released on Elektra Records, and although there may be traces of the Galaxie sound on it, it basically sounds quite a bit different. Luna is much smoother than Galaxie, less experimental, and, by the time of 1994’s Bewitched (also on Elektra), at least in my opinion, much more polished. For my money, Luna is a far better band, especially after the arrival of the guitarist Sean Eden who played on Bewitched and has played on all of their subsequent records. There is another funny bit from Black Postcards where Dean talks about Sean’s approach to making music:

By the end of the Rendevous sessions, Bryce had come up with a new way to produce Sean.  “Sean,” he said.  “You can come in at eleven tomorrow morning and play your twenty guitar solos, and figure out which one you like.  Adam will record you.  I don’t need to be here for that.”  “Sean is a brilliant guitarist,” Bryce told me.  “But he is one of these people who equates the music-making process with a great deal of pain.”

Dean also talks about in his book how at their final shows (Luna actually also broke up in 2005 but got back together in 2014 and are still together today, although Dean records more under his own name these days) Sean kept pushing to get his own songs (Eden wrote and sang two songs on Rendezvous) on the setlist, and Dean resisted because the songs aren’t much good, which is true, but because Eden is a key part of Luna, Dean was willing to give way. However another member of the Luna universe, not a band member more like a producer of their live shows I kind of forget, would change the setlist at the last minute to remove the Eden songs. Dean approved, but didn’t want to do it himself.

Dean was the beating heart of both Galaxie 500 and Luna, so it is understandable to me that he called the shots in both cases. Damon and Naomi are both interesting musicians, and contributed a lot to Galaxie’s more arty sound, however sans Dean they are ultimately pretty minor, artistically. Damon is known today for two other reasons; the first is he is a prominent and very articulate, critic of Spotify, and secondly he hosted a podcast, and maybe still does, on sound and its various incarnations, which I have listened to and it’s good. So Damon is pretty high level, even if he got in my face in 2005 or 2006.

Overall, the break up of Galaxie 500 (as well as the much less dramatic tension in Luna) is a fascinating example of the push and pull that occurs in bands. Personally, I’m glad the band did break up because the Luna records are indispensable and the Galaxie ones, for the most part, are not, at least for me. I have not, incidentally, had a chance to see Luna play live, however I did see Dean play in 2018 as a kind of support for a guy called Cheval Sombre. They did a record together, which is pretty good, but not great. I didn’t get a chance to talk with Dean after the show, however I did speak with Cheval and he said “now I need to go and hide” and basically told me how miserable he was. Now that was not great, because he was playing with Dean motherfucking Wareham! But Cheval clearly had his own things going on. In any case, I really want to see Luna live. They are still touring, but seem to be only playing a few shows here and there according to Songkick.com, a super great website that tells you where everyone is playing. If I can get my little resources together I’m gonna do it. As for Damon and Naomi, they haven’t played live for about a year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they added new dates sometime. And if they come to Japan, I’ll be sure to be there with my Pernod.

Dedication: For all three members of Galaxie 500, who have all had a pretty big impact on me one way or another.

Sources:
Black Postcards (Dean Wareham),
A Head Full of Wishes (galaxie500.com),
Prior Kyoto Kibbitzer posts.